A writer must “know and have an ever-present consciousness that this world is a world of fools and rogues… tormented with envy, consumed with vanity; selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions… He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics…” —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). “The nobility of the writer's occupation lies in resisting oppression, thus in accepting isolation” —Albert Camus (1913-1960). “What are you gonna do” —Bertha Brown (1895-1987).

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

“Anti-democratic forces [are] at the heart of American politics” by Henry Giroux

“…Rather than forcing a populace to adhere to a
particular state ideology, the general public in the United States is largely
depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher
education, and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values,
civic consciousness, and critical citizenship are also the result of the work
of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial
interests, a powerful corporate controlled media that are largely center-right,
and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship
to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. In addition, a
pedagogy of historical, social, and racial amnesia is constructed and
circulated through a highly popular celebrity culture and its counterpart in
corporate-driven news, television, radio, and entertainment to produce a
culture of stupidity, censorship, and diversionary spectacles…

“What is particularly troublesome is the manifestations
of totalitarianism in the discourse and proposed policy measures of the
extremists that now govern the Republican Party and how this is taken up in the
mainstream media. One finds in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Scott Walker,
Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and others a mix of war like values, expressions of
racism, a hatred of women’s rights, unabashed support for the financial elite,
a religious fundamentalism, a celebration of war, and a deep seated hostility
for all things public. Chris Christie sells himself to the American public as a
bully and believes that threatening violence is a crucial element of
leadership. This was on full display when he recently stated that teachers’
unions ‘are the single most destructive force in public education in America [and deserve] a punch in the face [xi].

“Threatening violence appears to be a powerful
ideological register shared by many of the Republican Party candidates. Donald
Trump comes close to supporting a form of racial cleansing by threatening to
depart 11 million undocumented Mexican immigrants all the while demonizing them
as rapists and criminals. This script has been played out before just prior to
the genocide promoted in Nazi Germany. Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, and Scott
Walker want to abolish a woman’s right to abortion, and go so far as to argue
that they would not permit women to get an abortion even if their lives
depended on it. Huckabee takes this threat even further. When Rolling
Stone’s Matt Taibbi asked Huckabee if he would send ‘the FBI or the
National Guard to close abortion clinics,’ he answered 'We'll see when I'm president' [xii]. Huckabee is a real piece of work stating at one point that he would deny an
abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim [xiii].This hatred of women and the need to control and domesticate them to the
crudest forms of male hegemony and control is central to all fascist regimes…”

Teacher/Poet/Musician

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Persona

"I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradiction and nonsense" —Albert Camus (1913-1960).